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The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Every year, when Nobel Prizes are awarded in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine, critics note that they are an absurd and anachronistic way of recognizing scientists for their work. Instead of honoring science, they distort its nature, rewrite its history, and overlook many of its important contributors. There are assuredly good things about the prizes. Scientific discoveries should be recognized for the vital part they play in the human enterprise. The Nobel Prize website is an educational treasure trove, full of rich historical details that are largely missing from published papers. And it is churlish to be overly cynical about any event that, year after year, offers science the same kind of whetted anticipation that's usually reserved for Oscar or Emmy nominees. But the fact that the scientific Nobels have drawn controversy since their very inception hints at deep-rooted problems. [...] The wider problem, beyond who should have received the prize and who should not, is that the Nobels reward individuals -- three at most, for each of the scientific prizes, in any given year. And modern science, as Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus write in Stat, is "the teamiest of team sports." Yes, researchers sometimes make solo breakthroughs, but that's increasingly rare. Even within a single research group, a platoon of postdocs, students, and technicians will typically be involved in a discovery that gets hitched to a single investigator's name. And more often than not, many groups collaborate on a single project. The paper in which the LIGO team announced their discovery has an author list that runs to three pages. Another recent paper, which precisely estimated the mass of the elusive Higgs boson, has 5,154 authors.
The Nobel prizes awarded for science always seem to make sense. The literature ones most of the time too. It's the peace prizes (e.g., Obama in first year as president...whaaa?) that often leave people shaking their heads.
But the fact that the scientific Nobels have drawn controversy since their very inception hints at deep-rooted problems
Well, why don't you start a company, make a few $$$$ Billion and then you can establish science-based prizes according to your wishes?
Seriously. They seem to me to be a great way of acknowledging some aspects of scientific endeavour. They probably aren't perfect, but what is?
To gripe on about them sounds like an easy, lazy, route. Either that or sour grapes from the people who missed out. Especially when the alternative is nothing compared to the publicity and financial rewards the Nobels offer.
I suspect that whatever changes were proposed, there would be someone, somewhere, who would find reasons to complain about that, too. But since no scientists (or nominees in other fields) actually starts out with the intention to win a Nobel, it's just a nice little extra if or when the phone call comes.
Try to be a little more easy-going and less discontented with the world.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This is much more of a problem for physics than other fields. While there are physics papers with massive numbers of authors, even in biology one won't see more than about 30 authors. And in math it is rare for a paper to have more than 3 or 4 authors- so the equivalent award there, the Fields Medal, is completely reasonable. In some of the physical sciences such as physics one has these very large author lists, and it isn't always completely clear how much actual work was done by some of the people on the collaborations; astronomy seems to be in a similar situation (but since astronomy doesn't have its own famous award, it doesn't come up in this context).
Note also that Nobel's original will did not have the restriction to 3 people, although it actually had an intent of it going to a single person https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html, so if we're going to allow it to go to multiple, why stop at 3? On the other hand, it seems that people understand that when someone like the director of LIGO gets the prize that they are functionally getting it for the project as a whole.
Nobel Prizes became irrelevant in 2007. That's when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the 676 authors of the fourth IPCC assessment report. There was a time when the Nobel Peace Prize was a significant award. Apparently now you can get one for writing a small piece of a highly politicized work of fiction. Nobel Prizes should be reserved for those who make significant and useful accomplishments, not for creating propaganda.
What we need to do is make sure that everyone who does science gets a nobel participation trophy, to show that we value their work too. That will ensure the awards retain their meaning and value that so far has only been managed by exclusivity and competitive merit.
All three of those prizes do recognize. You can maybe argue that literature has been overly focused on European literature and even more so on Swedish literature to the exclusion of others, and with a very specific idea of what counts as "literature" (See some discussion here http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/10/nobel_gas.html). But the works being recognized are still major literary achievements.
However, the Peace prize has for all its issues, recognized some real accomplishments. Last year, the prize went to Juan Manuel Santos for his work trying to end the ongoing violence in Columbia, and although the initial peace deal was rejected by the voters, the follow-up seems to be really holding and FARC seems to have been mostly disarmed. Real progress can occur.
The Economics prize has also gone for serious and substantial work. (Note that the Econ prize is actually from a separate grant and awarded by a separate body (hence being referred to at the Nobel Memorial Prize officially rather than the Nobel Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences) .) Examples of substantial work include the 2005 prize to Schelling and Aumann recognized major work that is relevant not just to understanding economics, but many related fields including general negotiation theory and some aspects of what is sometimes called political economy. For example, the idea of a Schelling point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) has found its way into standard negotiating texts, and it is useful for simply making people more likely to come to agreements. Similarly, Aumann's agreement theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem is important not just in economics (for understanding how markets behave) but has also become relevant in philosophy as well as AI research. This is not the only example in econ, just one of the more blatant.
That you personally really like certain specific STEM fields says more about you than it does about the prizes.